Looking to the stars is as old as human existence. Since the earliest days of space exploration, astronauts - primarily male - have captured our imagination as explorers of the beyond. The earliest US space explorers were depicted as new-age male heroes, carrying out the aspirations of our country and, to an extent, the world. These representations have echoed the American myth of the heroic, solitary cowboy exploring and conquering territories at the edge of the unknown. In addition, we look deep into the infinite past with our earth-based and orbiting telescopes. Both the telescopes and the astronauts, who are now both spacemen and spacewomen are humanity’s emissaries and “eyes,” penetrating space, the unknown future and the unknown deep past. 

In this series of image composites, I have combined NASA photographs of astronauts, past and present, with images of deep space from NASA’s ground-based telescopes and orbiting telescopes. These juxtapositions are meant to be playful and to stir our imaginations about the early days of space exploration, the hero myth and the relationship of past and present. Archival images in this series were sourced from the NASA website, PICRYL and Internet Archive public domain media search engines.